Facebook Privacy Repost Scam

IN SOCIAL MEDIA TIPS

You’ve seen it before – someone in your Facebook newsfeed copies and pastes a status message with an emphatic use of ALL CAPS, saying: with Facebook privacy changes, the poster’s information may be made PUBLIC unless you DO SOMETHING. Maybe you’ve even posted this before, nervous about the new features and shifts in Facebook’s ever changing landscape.

It’s no surprise people fall for it – this scam/spam/praying on our fears demand uses words like “graph” and “app,” making it sound like it knows what it’s talking about. But it’s a chain letter that just won’t go away – a post urging people to take an action that doesn’t actually affect privacy.

The scam does do something – it takes your life events, comments and likes out of your friends’ newsfeeds that comply. But it doesn’t protect what you post from becoming public. Only you can do that.

4 Ways to Keep Things You Do on Facebook as Private as Possible

1. Make sure your posts are only shared with friends

When you post things on Facebook, make sure you are only posting to your friends (or a more restricted list). If your posts are set to “friends of friends” or “public,” they will be visible to your friends’ friends and anyone else who finds your Facebook page.

Also, don’t tag people if you don’t want the post to be visible outside of your friend circle. Tagged people’s friends will see the post depending on the tagged person’s settings.

2. Only like or comment on posts that your friends set to “friends”

When you take action by liking or commenting on your friends’ posts, your activity is visible in several ways:

If the post is set to friends, your action will be visible on the post to any of that friend’s friends. It will also appear in mutual friends’ real time ticker (the running list on the right side of your newsfeed) and may appear as a news story in mutual friends’ newsfeeds.

When a post is set to friends of friends, your action may be visible to all your friends, even if they don’t know the person who posted it. You know when you see a story in your newsfeed that says, “Tom likes Laura’s photo,” and you know Tom but don’t know Laura? It’s because Laura’s post that Tom liked was set to friends of friends or public. And you are a friend of Tom, who is friends with Laura.

A public post is the same as friends of friends, except it is visible to everyone. It acts like a friends of friend post in the way that you may see a story in your newsfeed on your friends’ action on their friends’ posts set beyond friends only.

(How many times can I say “friend” in a post?)

Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t allow you to hide your commenting and liking activity from your friends’ newsfeeds. Your friends have to do so themselves with the settings described in this Facebook privacy repost scam – by hovering over your name and removing the check on “comments & likes.”

3. Make sure you understand your privacy settings on your profile and account

If you use Facebook and have filled in information on your profile page such as where you work and live, email address, religious beliefs, etc., take the time to confirm your privacy settings are what you want them to be. Don’t forget to take a look at your “about” page (which is easy to forget once filled it out) and click on the right side “edit” dropdowns next to each section to see who can view your information.

The safest thing, of course, is to not give Facebook more information than it needs, and to set the visibility of things you are required to fill in, like your email address, to “only me.”

Also, “liking” a brand page is a public action no matter what you do. So if you don’t want information like that shared, clean up your likes by deciding if you wouldn’t mind this brand using you in promoted posts to your friends’ newsfeeds. (A quick Google search yields tons of Facebook privacyposts.)

4. Know that nothing is really private if you’re posting it on the internet

Above all else, know that everything and anything you post is not really private. Anyone can take a screenshot of what you have posted on your Facebook page or in a private message and repost it publically.

The image above is a screenshot from a friend’s posting of the scam. I cut off the person’s thumbnail and name to protect their privacy and the comments below it to protect the privacy of this person’s friends, but you can take a picture of anything on the internet. If you are posting appropriate things to your friends, this shouldn’t be an issue – but it’s something to note when you’re feeling blue and want to tell everyone on Facebook in a long 3am rant. (You know that friend.)

Facebook really is a great way to stay connected with friends and family, but understanding how it works is important. It’s not difficult to manage your privacy; it just takes time and patience. The truth of the matter is, if we are posting things on Facebook, we probably have 15 minutes to learn about the best way to do so.